It Was Ever Thus
Free speech for thee but not for me
Another relaxing week in America.
The right will defend to the death Joe Rogan’s right to use the N-word and joke with his buddies about forcing women to give them blow-jobs—as is their right—but this is not a First Amendment issue. It’s not even an argument about Rogan per se (though his trolls have been out in unified force) but rather about a multi-billion-dollar company paying somebody tens of millions of dollars to be racist and misogynistic.
On the other hand, the number of book-banning requests more than doubled from 2020 to 2021—a trend that is clearly continuing. “Conservatives” (I put the word conservative in quotes because I don’t even understand what it means in a political context anymore) are taking over school board meetings and demanding that dozens of books about or dealing with issues of racism, sexuality, gender identity—or containing profanity or naked mice—be removed from schools.
As I’ve mentioned, the only reason I picked up the first Harry Potter book was because some religious fanatics were clamoring to have it banned (which is usually the best way to get somebody to do something). I didn’t think much of The Chamber of Secrets (though the series improves with every installment, as did the movies). I thought it could be derivative sometimes or that some of the characters weren’t drawn particularly well. Never once did I think that my mortal soul was in danger because of the author’s depiction of witches, wizards, and magic.
Now they’re burning Harry Potter books—at least one “pastor” and his flock in Tennessee are. They used books from the Twilight series for kindling as well (because vampires, I guess). I have no sympathy for these people—none. I wouldn’t burn Mein Kampf, for god’s sake. But imagine the levels of ignorance, the fragility of people who would walk in lockstep with some guy who—using the cloak of religion—encourages them to engage in such an act of malevolence. “Stop allowing demonic influences into your home,” he told them. Perhaps he was looking in a mirror when he said it.
The COVID States Project recently released a survey in which 23,000 respondents were asked if it is "ever justifiable to engage in violent protest against the government?" [Emphasis mine.]
Almost 25% answered that violence was "definitely" or "probably" justifiable against the government. This group was almost evenly split between liberals and conservatives. This is a larger percentage answering the question in the affirmative than in the past but these results aren’t, or shouldn’t be, surprising—after all, this country was born in armed revolution against a government.
What is cause for alarm is that 10% of respondents, almost all of them Republicans, believe that violent protest is justified against our government right now. When looking at the responses of Republican men that number increases to almost 20%. Do we think it’s time for the mainstream media to start taking this shit seriously?
So, a few things happened last week that might not seem related but they definitely are.
I know the bar has been set so low it appears to be at the Earth’s molten core, but Mike Pence’s speaking the simple truth that Donald is wrong to claim Pence had the power to overturn the results of the 2020 election isn’t bravery. Especially because when Pence finally did speak, it was over a year after his words would have made a difference. Everything Pence does is based on the calculation that it will be good for his political future. For over five years he decided that sucking up to Donald in the most odious, sycophantic way was his best path forward. If he is telling the truth now—a truth he knows will bring the wrath of Donald and his minions down upon his head--there is a reason and it has nothing to do with his wanting to do the right thing for anybody but himself.
Pence made his statement on February 4, the same day the Republican National Committee released this:
“RESOLUTION TO FORMALLY CENSURE LIZ CHENEY AND ADAM KINZINGER AND TO NO LONGER SUPPORT THEM AS MEMBERS OF
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY”
“Legitimate Political Discourse” According to the RNC, “Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger [. . . ] have demonstrated, with actions and words, that they support Democrat [sic] efforts to destroy President Trump more than they support winning back a Republican majority in 2022.”
Further, the resolution claims the two members of Congress “are participating in a Democrat-led [sic] persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse [emphasis mine].”
Read the entire document if you dare. It is a breath-taking exercise in mendacity, cynicism, and stunning immaturity—all of which are now compulsory if you want to be a member of today’s Republican Party.
In analyzing these two events, the lede in the Washington Post article frames them this way:
“Former vice president Mike Pence and the Republican National Committee have made radically different bets [emphasis mine] on whether the GOP can break up with former president Donald Trump without abandoning Trumpism, and whether loyalty to him is a political asset or might be a liability.”
That’s what they call the RNC’s decision to confer legitimacy not only upon the violent insurrection and the violence of the insurrectionist but any future taking-up-of-arms as long it’s in service to the Right’s agenda. It’s just a fucking bet.
“If I run and if I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly. We will treat them fairly,” Donald said. “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.”
Donald often floats trial balloons during his hate rallies and maybe that’s what he was doing last weekend. But we now know that, as his administration came to a close, Donald was considering issuing blanket pardons for the January 6thinsurrectionists.
Washington Post journalist Philip Bump puts it this way: “We’ve been at this too long to grant Trump the benefit of the doubt that he simply stumbled onto something that might buy him both time and silence from those being targeted by investigators. However it came up, though, the effect was the same: potentially buying him time and potentially buying him silence.”
This is a tactic that, thanks in part to our broken justice system, the failures of the media, and the allyship of the corrupt rich and powerful, has benefitted Donald for his entire life. My guess is Donald knows that the walls are closing in but he is also well aware that legal time moves very slowly. He’s banking on getting back into the Oval Office before any indictments are handed down and witness tampering will give him even more time to get away with his crimes until the cursed OLC memo starts protecting him again.
We also learned that, in violation of the Presidential Records Act, some official documents sent to the January 6 Committee were “torn up, taped back together — mirroring a Trump habit.” Yes, this is something Donald has done for a very long time—open mail, read through it, throw it on the floor or rip it up and then throw it on the floor. But in this instance, he wasn’t acting in his capacity as a private citizen. The documents he destroyed didn’t belong to him: they belonged to us and by rights should have been filed at the National Archives and Records Administration intact. It’s lovely that somebody in the Executive Branch saw fit to tape the pieces of paper back together, thereby preserving them, but talient point is that Donald destroyed official government documents. Calling it a “habit” totally undermines the seriousness of the offense and the likelihood that people will view it as such.
Additionally, the National Archive had to spend taxpayer money for a trip to Mar-A-Lago in order to retrieve 15 boxes of documents that, again, belong to the government, not the inhabitant of a golf club. The articles sub-head reads:
“The recovery of 15 boxes from Trump’s Florida resort, including letters from Barack Obama and Kim Jong Un, underscores the previous administration’s cavalier [emphasis mine] handling of presidential records”
I didn’t realize that “cavalier” was a synonym for “illegal.” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Two wrongs don’t make a right but if the second wrong counters, at least in part, the first one, cool. The Democratic-led New York State legislature has redrawn the maps to give the party an opportunity to pick up three more House seats. The New York Times’ article says, “Democrats across the nation have spent years railing against partisan gerrymandering, particularly in Republican states — most recently trying to pass federal voting rights legislation in Washington to all but outlaw the practice. But given the same opportunity for the first time in decades, Democratic lawmakers in New York adopted on Wednesday an aggressive reconfiguration of the state’s congressional districts.”
The Times tried to make the Democrats look like hypocrites for using dark money to finance their 2020 victories—apparently, it’s only OK to use under-handed quasi-legal means to win if you’re a Republican. I for one am glad the Democrats are starting to play hardball and willing to exploit the weaknesses in the system (almost entirely introduced by Republicans on the Supreme Court)in order to achieve parity, or at least try.
UNDER THE RADAR AND ON THE HORIZON
I’ll write more about this another time, but professional tennis player and three-time Olympian Peng Shuai continues to be controlled by the Chinese government after she took to social media last November to accuse Zhang Gaoli, a former higher-up in the Chinee government, of sexual assault. She disappeared for two weeks.
In December 2021, unable to establish Shuai’s safety, even after she re-emerged, the Women’s Tennis Association announced its decision to pull its tournaments from China—a move that will cost the organization tens of millions of dollars.
Steve Simon, Chief Executive of the WTA Tour wrote, “If powerful people can suppress the voices of women and sweep allegations of sexual assault under the rug then the basis on which the WTA was founded — equality for women — would suffer an immense setback. I will not and cannot let that happen to the WTA and its players.”
Recently Peng Shuai gave her first interview to an independent media outlet, France’s L’Equipe, but she was accompanied by two Chinese government officials. According to Simon, “Her recent in-person interview does not alleviate any of our concerns. We continue to hold firm on our position and our thoughts remain with Peng Shuai.”
If only the International Olympic Committee had similar concerns. The fact that the IOC is willing to hold the Olympic Games, despite the country’s committing egregious atrocities against the Uighurs, is testament to the fact that it is one of the most corrupt organizations on the planet. Its leaders do not care about human rights—even of a three-time Olympian. Just imagine how much pressure the IOC could have brought to bear against the Chinese government to secure Peng Shuai’s safety and freedom. Instead it looked to its bottom line. Nothing about Peng Shuai’s appearances, social media posts, or interviews is authentic and none of the statements by the Chinese government or IOC president Thomas Bach is believable. As Dan Wolken put it, “At this point, if you could put a camera directly into Bach’s body, you’d find only gelatin where his spine used to be and a temporal lobe made of cellophane that has been taken over by propaganda.” This generously assumes Bach ever had a spine to begin with.
Meta, Facebook’s parent company, lost $230 billion in value on Thursday. Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune fell by $20 billion. The fact that one human being (and a despicable one at that) has so much money that he can lose $20 billion dollars in one day and not suffer any consequences—because he still has a net worth of $85 billion—is emblematic of so much of what is wrong with the way we’ve organized our society. If only we still had the 90% marginal tax rate that existed under FDR and Eisenhower.
When asked how many black women he has on his staff, Mitch McConnell said, “I haven’t checked, we don’t have a racial quota in my office.” Hahaha—he has none because, shocker, he’s a racist. OK, so that’s not under the radar at all. It would be awesome if Democrats reacted accordingly.
Reason #7 billion why the Supreme Court needs to have ethics guidelines: Neil Gorsuch, the man without honor who accepted the corrupt Supreme Court nomination stolen from Barack Obama by Mitch McConnell, gave a speech at the Federalist Society during the same event at which Mike Pence managed too tell the truth. Other speakers included far-right politicians Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and one of Donald’s former press secretaries Kayleigh McEnany. But no, the Supreme Court hasn’t been politicized.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) informs us that in excess of a hundred candidates running for office this year are right-wing extremists, many with ties to white supremacist groups like the Proud Boys. This is a 5-alarm fire that should put the mainstream media on notice and keep all of us up at night. And it should motivate us to engage in our politics more than we ever have.
I continue to believe that the greatest danger that we face is the complete absence of a "Plan B". Democratic leadership spent a decade pretending that the GOP wasn't a wildly obstructionist force, and refused to engage in unified messaging to awaken the country to the imminent danger. The media, in turn, failed in all the ways described, and continue to miss the forest for the trees. But, really, we're not currently living in a democracy...we have one party trying to govern in the midst of a pandemic under the shadow of probable Russian-initiated war, and one party gaslighting themselves and their country, with a SCOTUS that has shed even the pretense of legitimacy. Even if we survive the midterms without losing the House and Senate, then what? 10% of the country would start killing tomorrow if a leader assured them there would be no consequences. 25% of the country would rather risk death than believe science. 30% of the country maintains a visceral, irrational hatred of Democrats nurtured by decades of GOP propaganda. White supremacists and neo-Nazi groups are growing larger by the day. There is no common enemy that will unite this country. There is no common baseline or values that unites us as Americans. The insan ed levels of income inequality and untouchable power wielded by tech billionaires is unimaginable. Even if we avoid outright autocratic rule, how can we take seriously a rule of law that allows seditionists to operate with impunity, that protects white collar criminals and money launderer, while sentencing a Black woman to a 6-year jail sentence for trying to exercise the right to vote. Even if we once again save the country from fascism in 2022 and 2024, there is no long-term strategy to fix a country that has rotted to its core. There is no Plan B.
A wonderful piece Mary! Thank you for making us think.